A century-old brick bungalow at 1211 S. Corona St. in Denver’s West Wash Park is on track to become a 5,100-square-foot house with six bedrooms, two offices, a basement theater room and a rooftop deck — all without a single wall coming down to bare dirt. The homeowners bought the property for just over $1 million in May 2023 and chose to renovate rather than tear it down, even though the contractor overseeing the project says a full scrape would have been the easier path.
“It would have been a lot easier to scrape the lot and start from scratch,” Matt Plowman, general manager of Able Construction & Remodeling, told The Denver Post. Plowman, who has led the company since 2018, is managing the Corona Street project, which is expanding the basement downward instead of pouring an entirely new foundation and is expected to be completed in September. The transformation turns the original structure into a two-story home with an expanded basement while preserving the existing front porch.
Why Denver’s Code Rewards Keeping the Bones
The math behind that decision comes down to how Denver’s building code treats renovations differently than new construction. Per Denver’s residential plan review supervisor Mikaela Firnhaber, additions and renovations must bring only the new or altered portions of a house up to current code, while a full teardown and rebuild must comply with the current building code in its entirety — covering energy efficiency, stairs, structural engineering and height limits. That distinction lets projects like the one on Corona Street keep the original foundation, framing, room dimensions, ceiling heights and setbacks largely as they are.
Firnhaber described a scrape-and-build as offering a blank slate, but that blank slate comes with a steeper compliance bill. The Corona Street project is instead salvaging matching brick for a new rear wall and preserving the 100-year-old brick that gives the house its character. The basement is being expanded to include 9.5-foot ceilings, replacing what was roughly a 7-foot ceiling before the work began, and the rooftop deck will require extra structural support to handle snow-load requirements and a hot tub.
Inspections and Timelines Favor Renovation
The regulatory path also tends to move faster for renovations than for ground-up construction. A typical remodel requires a handful of inspections, while new builds trigger more than a dozen, according to the Post’s reporting. Denver’s review timelines currently run about two weeks for additions and new construction, and interior remodels that do not expand a home’s footprint often move through review within two days. Even so, permit review requirements can cause unexpected costs on custom projects, and homeowners may only discover requirements for retaining walls, rooftop decks, window wells, drainage, and lot grading once the permit review is already underway…